Goranduxt

Goranduxt, or Gurandukht, daughter of the Khosroid prince Mihr, was the bride through whom the ancient royal house of Kartli passed a crown to the rulers of Abkhazia. Her marriage to Leon, eristavi of the Abkhazians, is recorded in the history attributed to Juansher in the Georgian Chronicles, and it is the first dynastic link between the eastern Georgian royal line and the western house that would later produce the kings of Abkhazia and, through them, the united Georgian monarchy. The chronicle relates that Mihr, the elder son of the prince Stephanoz, was mortally wounded defending Anakopia against the Arab general Marwan, remembered in Georgian sources as "the Deaf," in the 730s. Dying, he told his brother Archil that he had no heir, "for seven daughters were born to me," and that their fathers had married their daughters only to kings or to the family of the Persian kings. He now asked Archil to marry the girls to the eristavis of Kartli and divide the land among them. Archil gave six nieces to leading nobles, among them a son of Guaram the curopalate, a pitiakhsh of the Peroz family, and a descendant of King Mirian. The seventh, Goranduxt, was reserved for a greater alliance. After the Byzantine emperor confirmed Leon as hereditary eristavi of Abkhazia, Leon offered Archil his loyalty, and "Archil married Gurandukht, his niece, to Leon, and gave him the crown which was given by the Greek Caesar to Mihr. And they gave promises to each other and swore that there would be no enmity between them, and Leon obeyed Archil during all his days." No other detail of her life survives: neither dates nor children are recorded, and the chronicle does not describe her death. Modern lists of Abkhazian rulers place Leon I in the mid-eighth century, most often around 745 to 767. The Divan of the Abkhazian Kings, compiled under Bagrat III, treats Leon's house as the founding line of the kingdom, and it is within that tradition that this marriage came to be seen as the moment when the Khosroid inheritance of Egrisi and its crown passed to Abkhazia.